Free Business Training

As ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey grow in scope and start getting used by more than your average IT firm, we are finding that more and more of our partners and clients are desperate for practical business and business technology training.

Not necessarily business owner training.. but making employees more aware of the business process and how all the pieces of the company fit together.

With Shockey Monkey we’re definitely making huge impact in how the business organization and process implementation are taking place (and yes, I love it when I see you fanboys of other platforms signing up for it and running it in parallel) – but the tool is only as good as the data that people feed it.

We talked to a lot of our partners about their current training issues. Here are some concerns that kept on popping up repeatedly:

Those tend to be the choices. The IT world is too small to create effective business training that can fit the budget – we recently got a flyer for a 1 day ITIL seminar at $1,500 a person. The cheaper versions are typically sponsored (read: These are sales seminars, not training seminars even though you may get a nugget of useful info here and there) or so broad that the typical technology firm will get very little value from it.

With Shockey Monkey we proudly built a system that doesn’t require more than an hour of training. But where people obviously need help is in their day-to-day business organization, management, marketing, sales, trend recognition, social media, customer relationship, vendor management and virtually every other aspect of running a business.

And as a technology owner, you don’t want to have an office full of dumb IT guys running around tripping over their gadgets and scripting skills. You’d kind of aspire to make them more creative in the ways that could make you (and them) more money. Asking an IT guy to sell is like asking a sales guy (mostly illiterate) to write drivers. The winning strategy is to make sure everyone gets a taste of what everyone else is doing so they can work better together.

This is something we hope to do.

This is also why it’s great to be me.

I have a lot of friends that want to be a part of this and business-wise.. I am really mostly concerned about the success of my partners (not vendors that I have to play nice with) so here we go..

On April 23rd we will be launching an online business technology training workshop.

Accountability matters: This is more than just a webinar. We will be running surveys, quizes, providing collateral and other training stuff that will tell you 1) if your employee paid attention 2) if they grasped the basic concepts 3) where you need to spend more time. There will be no recording of this – but you won’t have to travel or be away from work either. Just the afternoon on April 23rd.

What you (business owner) get out of this is: Employee is still at their desk in your office. They will have a much better understanding of the new emerging technology / trends impacting our industry. Employee is still available for anything urgent and business doesn’t come to a standstill. You get a report of how much attention they paid to the event and how well they comprehended the material.

What your employees get out of this: Free training on the company time. Better understanding of emerging technologies and business. More appreciation for what everyone around them does (or for the cynics: more awareness and more material for office jokes about how useless X department is). Extensive Q&A after every section.

Just training: Only one mention of ExchangeDefender and one mention of Shockey Monkey. Not in a sales “please buy our shit now” way either. No sponsors. No commercial messages. No specials. You don’t have to become an ExchangeDefender partner. You won’t have to accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior. You don’t have to donate any organs. You don’t have to eat a hot dog. You don’t have to wake up at the crack of dawn and party till 3 AM as a matter of social obligation: Just focus for 4 hours.

The first one is on me, all I ask is that you let us know how it went and what we should do to improve it. Unless it absolutely bombs and 5 people show up for it, we will do this on a quarterly basis and have already brainstormed a year worth of topics that we can cover at quarterly workshops.. or more often depending on demand.

I can tell you from running the SBS Show back in the day that I still have people coming up to me telling me how their whole company tuned into it and strategized their business around what we discussed. And that was just Chris and me joking around the annoyances in our industry.

This is a genuine workshop event. No Nobel winners in economics. No IT mavens. You’re not joining a cult. Or signing up for a pyramid scheme. Just practical training from people that deal with the same problems you deal with.. and collectively we can solve them.

What’s in it for me? Well, we are trying to provide a service that is desperately needed by the industry but we don’t know what it needs to look like. This first free one is on me and I know my friends and partners will help me build something valuable. Don’t worry about me, every Corvette has the fuel gauge on the F, we will make money in the long term but we have to get it right first and earn it. So please, if you can, help us promote this.